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40 Berkshire Living May 2007
A Walk to
Remember
The Pittsfield, Mass., native and author
of Last of the Donkey Pilgrims
proves that not all who wander are lost
Written by Amanda Rae Busch
Photography by Christina Lane
t’s an intimidating prospect:
pen a story about another writer, especially one with much more experience,
wit, and flair—not to mention one who once trekked
1,720 miles around the perimeter of Ireland accompanied only
by a stubborn mare and then crafted a comical and poignant
memoir of the journey. Hoping to organize my thoughts, I take
a brisk lap around Park Square before meeting up with Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, native Kevin O’Hara in his hometown at—where
else—Patrick’s Pub.
All anxiety is immediately allayed, however, over pints of
Guinness as the fifty-eight-year-old O’Hara—soft-featured, silver-maned, and radiating a warm, gracious enthusiasm from his
slender frame sheathed in a maroon cable-knit sweater and taupe
twill trousers—makes an unexpected confession: it took him more
than twenty years to write his memoir, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims,
published in 2004 by Forge Books.
“I didn’t really have writer’s block; I just had an overwhelming task,” O’Hara insists in his typically modest manner. “It was a
once-in-a-lifetime journey—to write that down on paper, how do
you catch it?”
But catch it he did. Using an exhaustive journal of the soulsearching jaunt around his ancestral homeland with nothing but
the beloved Missie “Long-Ears” Mickdermot and a green hardcover copy of The Hobbit, O’Hara eventually crafted a 430-page
chronicle of 1979 Ireland and the warmth and generosity of its
culture. He set out on his journey amid public ridicule, carrying
the discontent bottled inside his soul since serving as a crash-rescue
firefighter and medic for a year in Vietnam. Yet despite a rough
start, he soon discovered an open door at every twist in the road.
“Once they knew I wasn’t a tinkerer or a traveler, I was home for
the night,” he marvels of the 140-plus homesteads that welcomed
him. “I never went into a pub in ’79 where I had to spend a dollar;
if I had the donkey outside that was it. [The book] is a tribute to
the people of Ireland, which was a very poor, Third-World country
when I did it.”
I
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Finding solace in the companionship of Missie and flaunting his
natural gift of gab, O’Hara ultimately earned respect as a brother
of the countryside instead of a
foolish wanderer on an improbable mission. And walking the old
roads allowed much time for selfreflection. “You go eight to ten
miles sometimes with very little
in the middle,” he notes. “All you
had was the twitching ears of your
donkey and yourself. You had a lot
of time to dream.”
When O’Hara finally returned
to Rattigan’s Pub in Kilrooskey,
County Roscommon, after the
yearlong loop, it was with the
same hundred dollars in his pocket, mystical bonds with thousands
of Irish comrades, and a mass of
vivid memories. His travels had
soothed a lifetime of wanderlust Fill ’er Up: Kevin O’Hara gets Missie “Long-Ears” Mickdermot ready for another day on the roads of Ireland (below) in 1979.
that began in 1953 at age five
upon leaving England with his Irish-born Lenox, Massachusetts. His father, Jimmy
“I never knew anything of what my
parents and four siblings on the Queen O’Hara, had yearned to safeguard his clan mother lost,” O’Hara later explains as we
Elizabeth to plant new roots on this side of against the inevitable “pains of emigration,” approach the first block of Wilson Street in
the Atlantic. Settling first in Great Neck, but living an ocean away from the lush, roll- Pittsfield and the six-room half-duplex he
New York, the family relocated to Lee and, ing hills of their native Ireland was a harsh shared with seven siblings for the bulk of his
shortly after, Pittsfield—close to an aunt in reality for his mother, Lella.
childhood. “But if you looked into the back-
42 Berkshire Living May 2007
Photos courtesy Kevin O’Hara
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Belita and Kevin O’Hara
yard when we were kids, our landlord had
about five or six junked automobiles he used
to tinker with, garbage cans, and clotheslines
on the tree with all its ugly limbs right over
the bedrooms of our house. Then we went
to Ireland with open fields, beautiful views,
friendly people, and I said, oh, my gosh.”
Though stirred by his mother’s nostalgia,
the impetus for O’Hara’s monumental trip
developed when he turned eighteen and his
own world changed dramatically. “I never
had to fight or carry a gun in the war,” he
begins, a pained expression creeping upon
his face. “The only thing I saw was what it
would be like walking through Baghdad
today—people getting blown away, the suffering. We used to go into Saigon a lot and
just photograph; you’d see children selling
newspapers without legs. It hits you.”
Inspired by Thomas Anthony Dooley, a
pioneering doctor who established hospitals
in Laos and Cambodia during the conflict
and who authored a gripping account, The
Night They Burned the Mountain, O’Hara
enrolled in the nursing program at Berkshire
Community College upon his return.
He eventually earned a position as an or-
44 Berkshire Living May 2007
derly at Berkshire Medical Center, where he
met his wife, Belita, but the angst from his
experience in Southeast Asia never quite dissipated. Even after two trips to Ireland with
Belita—post-honeymoon in 1974 and again
in 1977 for six months, which was ultimately
an overzealous attempt to learn the art of
thatching roofs in order to mend his Grannie
Kelly’s that resulted in a near-depletion of the
couple’s nest-egg—the feeling grew. It was
time for drastic measures.
“She was making dinner,” O’Hara recalls
of the evening he approached his wife with
the proposition. “I said I needed to take a
walk.” Belita, now sitting adjacent on one of
the green plaid couches in the couple’s cozy
living room on Montgomery Avenue, jumps
in. “I said, ‘OK, dinner won’t be ready for
another fifteen minutes.’ And he said, ‘No, I
have to take a really long walk.’”
Belita, a native of the Philippines, somehow understood. Now, with Last of the
Donkey Pilgrims approaching 20,000 copies sold and commencing a sixth soft-cover
printing, Belita still receives letters from
readers thanking her for granting O’Hara
permission.
“I look in the audience and I can see
the lumps rising up in people’s throats,”
says O’Hara of the regret he’s spotted at the
nearly two hundred readings he’s held so far
throughout New England. “Sometimes I feel
like the luckiest man in the world because
I did a journey of a lifetime and I was able,
after many years, to put it to paper . . . and it
reads all right, ya know?”
This is a serious understatement.
“Anytime you wanna feel good you pick it
Hoofin’ It: (Right) The author and Missie on their way in Ireland in 1979. (Opposite,
bottom) Donkeys collected over the years decorate Kevin O’Hara’s home office.
Photo courtesy Kevin O’Hara
up and read another chapter—it’s just filled with sweet beauty,” says Mike
Haley, a fellow Pittsfield native and movie producer currently collaborating with O’Hara to bring Last of the Donkey Pilgrims to the big screen.
A copy of the book landed in Haley’s hands after a chance meeting with
O’Hara’s brother Michael at the St. Joseph Central High School Class of
1960 reunion a couple of years ago.
“He has an honest eye—it wasn’t over-exaggerated or flowered or
twisted,” Haley observes. “And it’s got all the elements that will make a
great movie: a man’s struggle to find himself, a beautiful look at Ireland, a
story of man and donkey. . . . I saw a lot of potential for mysticism.”
O’Hara’s twenty-three-year-old son Brendan, a screenwriter and graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design, is helping pen the script,
and, “if the world spins right,” the trio hopes to begin shooting in the fall
of 2008. When asked about the project, O’Hara leans back in his chair
dramatically and takes a sweeping drag off an imaginary cigarette. It’s a
quintessential Kevin O’Hara moment, before he breaks back to modesty.
“No, that was great fortitude,” he insists, evidently still kind of shocked.
“Everything has been serendipitous; before the movie, the book came,
and that was because of Steve Satullo. Without his assistance, I would
have a pile of pages this high in my little room,” he confesses, throwing a
palm up above his head. “He pushed me to write it.”
Satullo, the former owner of Either/Or Bookstore in Pittsfield and
now a culture consultant to The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
is hesitant to take much credit. He had hosted an exhibition of O’Hara’s
photographs in a gallery attached to the bookstore shortly after the great
journey and was awestruck. “My feeling from the beginning was that
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he was a great storyteller with a great story
to tell, but he was untutored as a writer,”
Satullo says. “So we had a twenty-year seminar in writing!”
Indeed, O’Hara recalls climbing the
stairs to his home office many an evening,
just after the St. Charles Church bells rang
at six, and slipping on headphones pumping
Van Morrison to drown out the sound of son
Eamonn—now twenty-six and a classical
pianist trained at the Boston Conservatory—
“bangin’ away” on the ivories in their downstairs living room. “The journey was so far
away that the only thing to get [you] back
was Van Morrison in your ear and a Guinness
by your side,” O’Hara insists. “I dug out the
memories.”
Over the course of those twenty-odd
years—transitioning from a typewriter to a
word processor to a Gateway PC along the
way—the process ebbed and flowed like the
waters crashing into the Cliffs of Moher.
Multiple voyages to Ireland left voices fresh
in his mind, vital to the dialogue-heavy narrative. But still, “I put it away for months, for
years,” O’Hara confesses. “Then I’d be playing golf, coming down the eighteenth hole,
and I’d hit an errant shot—which came quite
frequently—and I’d say, you can’t focus on this
game because you should really be writing.”
His work at the hospital actually helped
immensely. “When people are true with
emotions—which they are especially when
they’re hurt—I think you catch their pain.
You see that so vividly day after day; when
you write a character who suffers you see all
the symptoms. And I think it’s part of the
Irish psyche anyway to be a little gray and
forlorn, especially in a world that suffers.”
Spencer Trova, founder and former executive director of Main Street Stage in
North Adams, Massachusetts, has worked at
Berkshire Medical Center with O’Hara since
46 Berkshire Living May 2007
1978. “He had a lot of trouble making beds,”
Trova quips of the early days before offering
more serious analysis. “Kevin is probably one
of the more unique identities the world has
ever known. He can de-escalate any situation
with his humor, and is very adept at it—and
things get pretty tense working at the psychiatric unit.”
Trova recalls an instance “years ago when
we put patients in Geri chairs. There was a
woman who was agitated and banging on
the table with rhythm and almost screaming.
Kevin walked into the room and started dancing. A few minutes later she was laughing.”
Satullo agrees wholeheartedly that O’Hara
has that effect. When O’Hara introduced
him to Ireland in 1991, he says, “I experienced it as a spiritual place as well. It’s his ease
and comfort with any kind of person that
was key to his actually making the journey.
Kevin seems to know everybody, but even if
he doesn’t, he has this instant acquaintance
with them. It’s part of his writing—light and
humorous and winsome and engaging—and
part of his personality.”
B
ack at Patrick’s, O’Hara takes a swig
from his pint and leans across the
table as if to share a secret. “I stole
time,” O’Hara whispers, his blue-gray eyes
twinkling. “The old men on bikes, the old
donkeys with carts, the old women with cans
going to the well and back—that does not exist any longer.” The words are unnerving; he
estimates that the highways and byways that
have since cropped up across the Irish countryside, replacing charming thatched cottages and sheep-scattered fields, has triggered
a sixty percent increase in automobiles.
O’Hara leads a short tour through the
pub, pointing out his photographs of Ireland
that line the brick walls, and remarking that
his book’s 2004 launch party drained the
establishment of Guinness in a matter of hours . . . twice. “It’s funny,” he remarks. “The most outlandish, most spontaneous thing
I’d ever done has turned into the hallmark of my life.”
He’s already embarked on his next literary journey, a book of
short stories tentatively titled Stories From the Footbridge: Growing
Up Irish in New England in the 50s and 60s, slated for completion
in the spring of 2008. A prequel of sorts to Last of the Donkey
Pilgrims, the collection parades tales from a “bizarre, fun, loving,
tough in certain ways, poor but very rich childhood”—after-hours
shenanigans at St. Charles Parish and School, where his father
worked as a janitor; mornings trading milk money for Mallo
Cups at Nichol’s Pharmacy and afternoons sneaking into the Boy’s
Club and the CYC; crossing the now-decrepit Wahconah Street
footbridge to see his girlfriends; summers spent building soapboxderby rigs, splashing around in Pontoosuc Lake, and caddying at
the Country Club of Pittsfield—most influenced by his nostalgic
essays published in the Berkshire Eagle over the past two decades.
“It’s the little things,” says O’Hara softly. “You don’t have to come
from a great, grand place to have good stories.”
He’s naturally optimistic, and rightfully so. After all, his first
book has been praised as “like
John Steinbeck’s Travels with the goods
Charley, but much funnier,”
and the author himself has been Last of the Donkey Pilgrims
Kevin O’Hara
dubbed the Frank McCourt of By
Forge Books
the Berkshires. But ultimately, www.kevin-ohara.com
Kevin O’Hara is simply a genuine Kevin O’Hara reads from
storyteller.
Last of the Donkey Pilgrims
Irish musician Martina Laska
“I think there’s a rare gem in with
Friday, May 18 at 6
Kevin,” enthuses Haley, echoing Du Bois Center of American
scores of the author’s friends and History
684 South Main St.
colleagues—“Team O’Hara”— Great Barrington, Mass.
who collect religiously on Friday 413.644.9595
afternoons at Patrick’s to enjoy his
latest anecdotes. “He’s almost a throwback, a bard of the times
when he was brought up in Pittsfield—which we shared in a way.
He has a hunk of that Irish, romantic soul in him that you don’t
find today. I’m lucky to know him.”
Aren’t we all. BL
Amanda Rae Busch is assistant editor of Berkshire Living and remains
mesmerized by Kevin O’Hara’s tales, best enjoyed over a nice pint of Guinness
—or two.
Kevin O’Hara in a reflective moment at Patrick’s Pub in Pittsfield, Mass.